ABSTRACT
The criticisms hurt precisely because anthropologists generally see their discipline as committed to working against any form of cultural and racial prejudice. This makes it hard for them to see the prejudices that their own work inadvertently conveys prejudices, moreover, that it often shares with nationalistic ideologies. The use of stereotypes does not do much of an immediate nature for those who are stereotyped, except in this ironic sense as Phyllis Pease Chock. Because stereotypes do serve the interests of power, however, they carry the possibility of subversion and sometimes are used to achieve it; more often totalitarian regimes, as in Nazi Germany, use them to incite the majority population into becoming an instrument of the state repression of minority groups. In the analysis of modern conditions, it makes little sense to ignore the practical consciousness that social actors bring to what were once, perhaps, much less reflexively apprehended realizations of social and cultural difference.
